Old VE was somewhat cool I agree, however, the utility of the new one is fairly superior in my opinion in the current metagame. Strong burst of raid wide healing for few seconds is better than a constant little healing stream for a party

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

It's other way around. The new VE is designed that way to give an extra raid CD.

At the moment a good 70% of the classes offers a raid cd or a utility of sort. Expecially on the hybrid casters category, ele shamans had Healing Tide (talent first, baseline now), moonkins a decent Tranquillity. Shadow priests have VE.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

The raiding is now tuned on you having that many CDs. It's one of the many reasons about the 10v25 debate: while in 25 men you can reasonably assume CD stacking, in 10 men you can't guarantee it, hence why certain class stacking trivalize some 10 men fights.

When Mythic goes live, they can happily assume that in 20 men you got ,say, at least 13 raid CDs, and tune the damage accordingly.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

It's other way around. The new VE is designed that way to give an extra raid CD.

At the moment a good 70% of the classes offers a raid cd or a utility of sort. Expecially on the hybrid casters category, ele shamans had Healing Tide (talent first, baseline now), moonkins a decent Tranquillity. Shadow priests have VE.

Other way around.

The raiding is now tuned on you having that many CDs. It's one of the many reasons about the 10v25 debate: while in 25 men you can reasonably assume CD stacking, in 10 men you can't guarantee it, hence why certain class stacking trivalize some 10 men fights.

When Mythic goes live, they can happily assume that in 20 men you got ,say, at least 13 raid CDs, and tune the damage accordingly.

No, that IS my point. The amount of raid cooldowns is too damn high. Warriors alone bring a Demo and a Rally each, every hybrid brings at least one, etc.

It's not that it has an issue for 10-man. 10-man gets to play with fights that demand relatively horrific requirements of raid cd's as-is (Juggy and Thok, especially if you're relying on Tranq, are hilarious - 2 people for 1 cd? Awesome). The problem is that now pop raid cd's and stand in shit is the way to go because of the amount of raid cd's available - on both modes.

Where they do balance around extra raid cd's is like how Horridon on 25-man did just enough damage to warrant a raid cd each use, but 10-man did not. That's not the issue, raid cd's really do nothing there, because it's not like you could get hit by the only other source of damage, the pink Dino, anyway, 10-mans would need the cd's for Jalak, and all it did was add a requirement for the extra cd's, for one source of damage that was the only source of damage left, that was fine - the issue is raid cd's allowing for ignoring stuff that wasn't meant to be ignored. Infest was something tuned around the concept of chaining AM's, Sacrifice, Barriers etc - but this isn't like THAT; a comparable situation would be raid cd's allowing you to just let all Vile Spirits explode on whoever, or stand in Defile.

Take Garrosh - pop all the raid cd's, stand in the axe, Iron Star explodes, who cares, whatev. Complexity of that phase? Neutered. The mechanics aren't balanced around doing that - it's just that things allow for doing that when you can bring 6 raid cd's to each axe. Sha on 25-man was about ignoring Huddles and healing through it. The level to which that changed the fight/phase was HILARIOUS. Twins allowed you to not care about whether Lu'lin dropped 2 comets or not, or moving behind, because hey ALL THE RAID CD'S - basically the only hard part of the fight beyond the dps check. Meggy was way more annoying for 10-man than 25-man just because raid cd's. If we wanted to make it a 10/25 thing - I'd argue it's the reverse, 25 gets affected way more for class stacking and trivialising mechanics. There are even 25-man guilds that will sit any dps class without a dr cooldown just because it's much easier to not have to pay attention to shit (within limits) because it can't kill you because raid cd.

Even where they're required/tuned for, chaining raid cd's is nowhere near anything fun, or complex, or anything like that. Not now when you can literally pop them for no reason. YOu can have one up all the time, whether you need it or not. Just because they got rained out like candy. Copy macro, switch names isn't compelling gameplay.If that goes ahead in Mythic, it will be more boring than if we had to actually handle some of these mechanics properly. In my opinion.

Reason for the raid cd abudance / stacking is that atm they can't come up with any other way to actually pose a challenge to healers.

If you want that to change, you should first propose a new idea for this subject.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

They are introducing a change to smart heals in WoD (I heard that on Blizzcon, hopefully I didn't dream of it), and that is, smart heals won't anymore prefer the "most injured target" but rather just prefer "injured targets".So if you just spam chain heal, you might get people RNGd and die if you dont at least do the effort of aiming the CH on the lowest person for example.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

Worldie wrote:Reason for the raid cd abudance / stacking is that atm they can't come up with any other way to actually pose a challenge to healers.

If you want that to change, you should first propose a new idea for this subject.

No, that's not the reason. The reason has to do with an escalating race since early Cataclysm where raid cooldowns have been just another cool concept to throw out. Many of them are simply a product of the new Talent Trees. They're not limited to using the raid cooldowns to challenge healers; in fact, people are simply dropping healers because among other things, the raid cooldowns allow for that instead.

Don't get me wrong, in PVE in vanilla WoW, warriors were in a very good place. They could put out high DPS as a fury spec, and in the same spec they were more effective at tanking than a pally spec'd for tanking, just between defensive stance and available gear. In fact, we would declare a boss on farm mode when we downed it while our MT was in his fury spec.

IIRC, it was pretty damn commonplace to use a MS build for everything except the hardest hittign stuff that actually warranted going Deep Prot.

Yeah I only knew one Warrior who tanked in Prot spec back in vanilla, and he was in no way better off for the decision than his Arms/Fury teammates. He in fact was pissed that being Protection gave such a negligible, if any, benefit for his chosen role.

If I remember correctly you only really needed 1 prot war in the 40 men raid, and that was to tank actually hard hitters, all other tanks would spec MS/prot.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

I can't speak for 40man naxx, but we never needed a prot warrior for any of the other raids. We finished all the others without any warriors spec'ed prot more than the few talents at the beginning that were "required" for tanking. Most of ours were Arms (and a couple were fury).

There was talent at 11 prot that gave +50% threat or so, it was the only thing most people needed. I went as far as almost full AQ (just cthun we never killed) and 5 Naxx, and I remind we had 1 prot war (the main tank who got all de lewts) and just like 6 arms/prot Fury was a joke iirc.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

Darielle is completely right about the raid cooldown arms race. It's a bit absurd, and I think it forces encounter designers into corners on some fights. The move to 20-man mythic doesn't really solve that, it will just encourage groups to swap them around to tailor to the fight. For example, bringing a bunch of paladins for Devotion Aura on Thok.

Raid cooldowns are one of the things I'd like to see curbed in WoD as part of the "button bloat" solution.

I'm not sure I agree with him about DoT snapshotting, because I can't actually tell what his stance is. I think that it's good that snapshotting is going away for a variety of reasons, but I also respect that highly skilled players will probably miss it. It causes a huge degree of skill differentiation on specs that can take advantage of it (Affliction Warlocks, for example), which is neat for high-end (i.e. Mythic) raiders. The problem is that it makes balancing those classes much more difficult across a wide range of skill levels, which is why it's good that it's going away.

I'm not sure I agree with him about DoT snapshotting, because I can't actually tell what his stance is. I think that it's good that snapshotting is going away for a variety of reasons, but I also respect that highly skilled players will probably miss it. It causes a huge degree of skill differentiation on specs that can take advantage of it (Affliction Warlocks, for example), which is neat for high-end (i.e. Mythic) raiders. The problem is that it makes balancing those classes much more difficult across a wide range of skill levels, which is why it's good that it's going away.

Heh.

I think it flat out sucks. It's caused several issues for those specs (Afflic, Shadow, Feral are the big ones atm, Unholy had a bit of a thing with Feathers but I haven't kept up with Unholy in like ever), it makes them incredibly reliant on the right trinkets and stuff like that (being able to line up a Rune with the start of TED at 25% for Feral is like the difference between being Batman and Aquaman), and a lot of the "skill" aspect is bunched into addons for people getting into the spec or not good enough to keep track of things. Some of it is batshit-unintuitive, especially with clipping dots immediately after you apply them, it makes some abilities really sucky (Ferocious Bite for Feral), and it creates some really sucky and punishing situations mostly out of sheer randomness (get targetted by mechanic when trinkets are up, or trinkets proc right as the boss goes into a transition phase? Bye bye dps).

Plus it props up specs around issues. Demo had ONE thing - UVLS, DOOM. Outside of that, the spec has/had glaring issues.It basically puts a lot more of a variance on sheer randomness instead of skill sometimes, and while skill allows you to capitalise when the odds come good, the difference usually comes down to the better addon/UI. And it adds this huge gulf for someone attempting to pick up the spec and start; I honestly can't even imagine someone who hasn't played WoW really understanding what all the things mean for Feral for a very long time. That hurts the community as well, and it's evident in how bad some of the theorycrafting has become - Shadow Priests being one of the best examples for THAT.

And all of that assumes you had the luck to get the right drops to make it work. Didn't get UVLS for a long time in ToT? Meh. Didn't get Rune for a long time in ToT? Bleh. Still don't have Rune? Sucks to be you, because it's still best in slot, you can come close with 2 HWF'd trinkets, but you're always at a disadvantage because RNG didn't like you.

I think highly-skilled players are only worried that in removing it, Blizzard won't think to add complexity to the spec at all. I'm not so convinced, because I remember when Feral WAS complex, and still FUN, and it didn't need Bleed snapshotting to pull that off, so I think they CAN add some of it back. The problem now is, you can't because snapshotting is already complex, so there's no room to add it before removing snapshotting, and there's no guarantee that what they do add will be FUN complexity (I don't think snapshotting is fun complex, but it's certainly better than the idea of, say, Cataclysm Subtlety).

Oh don't get me wrong. Cataclysm Subtlety was fun, but that was in spite of the many unfun things about it. Things like having to prepot before Stealthing so that you could get a Prepot and be Stealthed for the opener, needing people to feed you with HAT so that you could Slice for the pull and have 5 cp's, there were "skill" elements that really aren't fun complex the way weaving the different buffs/debuffs were. On top of getting screwed out of your Evis and then being sadface, or being told "Hey you can't Backstab, sucks to be you, go respec for Ultraxion".

I enjoyed Subtlety for levelling and dungeoning. While I did a few raids on him, they weren't hardcore, so it wasn't really a biggie if my DPS on ultraxion was lower or if I didn't prepot. I found the general playstyle of subtlety to be really fun (who doesn't like teleport smashing things!). In some case, there was also the fun in the challenge of doing good dps in Subtlety (relative to the rest of the groups I was in). It was fun to see people in easier DPS classes/specs be surprised at my DPS. I'm sure they could technically beat my DPS due to mechanics, but they would have had to get better first.

It would be nice if Raidwide CDs weren't class dependant, so you wouldn't be forced to bring all the right classes. If, say, only healers would have CDs, all all healers would have more or less comparable CDs, you wouldn't be able to stack as much. You can't go stack a bunch of healers.

Vanilla was quite... unique. I don't recall who was exactly built like what, but I think we had 1 player always prot, just because he felt like that, and a second player switching between prot and dps depending on the current spot in progression. The rest of the tanks were all DPS. We also rarely had anyone tank more than one mob at the same time.

Though that makes me think. I actually would like to see some encounters that would require a couple more adds that needed to be tanked, but not by the tanks, but by other players. Plate DPS, Ferals, Hunters with Tanking pets, etc... It was pretty common to do that in Vanilla and early TBC, and it's a little sad that it's now gone. A lot of classes have tanking utility in their non-tank specs, but there really is no place for that anymore in the game.

Such things are not in place anymore, because essentially if you aren't in tank spec, a raid mob is going to 2shot you even if you go in tank "stance", both due to reduced tank stance effectiveness in non-tank spec (or even non existant in case of ret and monks), and due to the absence of active mitigation.And if a mob doesnt 2shot a non-tank, it doesnt require a tank at all.

Current game design, that's it.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.